At the end of January Flickr sent out emails to all of their users saying that they had until March 15th, 2007 to setup a Yahoo! account that would be used to manage the Flickr service. This caused quite an uproar in the blog community as well as all over the web. Many people were saying that Flickr was screwing them by forcing such a move, but ever since Yahoo! acquired them I knew that this time would come.

Seeing that the deadline for merging your Flickr account with a Yahoo! one comes tomorrow, it is no surprise that Flickr just launched one of the most requested features: collections! The name may not describe exactly what the new feature is, but with it you can create “sets of sets” which can also be considered to be subsets. For the sake of simplifying things you can look at a set as a folder on your computer, and now with collections you can actually have sub-folders to make organizing your photos even easier.

In order to use this feature you’ll need to be a Flickr Pro user because free users are limited to creating just 3 sets, which would pretty much make the collections feature useless. I have yet to pay for a photo service, but my fingers are itching to cough up the $24.95 for a 1 year pro account that offers:

Unlimited storage

Unlimited uploads

Unlimited bandwidth

Unlimited sets

Permanent archiving of high-resolution original images

Ad-free browsing and sharing

I’ve got more than 8GB of photos that I would like backed up somewhere and Flickr seems to be a good place to do it. There are all kinds of tools available to make managing your photos easy, and the new collections feature is something that held me back from picking any photo service. I like organizing my photos into folders and sub-folders because it makes them easy for me to find exactly what I’m looking for. Previously, I had sent emails to nearly all photo services that I came across requesting that they create some sort of folder management system. Now that Flickr has done this I’m extremely tempted to become a Pro user.

Congrats to Flickr on such a big feature release, but I’m sure it was purely coincidental that this was released just one day before all Flickr users must login with a Yahoo! account. ;)